Its official. People are stupid.

I was woken this morning to call 96 for the SRFD at just about 4:40 am. The call came in as MVA, Car vs. Semi hiway #1 10 km west of Strathmore in the Westbound lanes.

Past history show's that anything vs. semi at hiway speeds is going to result in bad things. So, I expected the worst as I headed to the hall.

Sounds bad huh? here's what really happened. Some guy from Sask. was heading east in the westbound lanes in his economy car. He crests a hill and is faced with a full sized SUV. Both drivers do evasive manouvers but still manage to tag each other with about 6 inches of each others vehicle. The SUV with more mass and a more lucent driver makes out better, but both spin out of control and hit the guard rail.

When we arrive Police are not yet on scene, and the medics have both drivers in the bus. both are reported as green (green=good). We close the road and wait for RCMP... a quick investigation, and we clear the debris from the #2 lane and re-open the hiway. We get to play traffic control until shortly after 07:00...

This is ok for a couple of reasons. First we recently purchased a VMSB (Variable Message Sign Board) for one of our bush trucks, so we were in a good posistion to give great advance warning to the early morning commuter traffic. Secondly, attending incidents on the highway provides a great stream of revenue.

It works something like this: Alberta Transportation has defined an approved rate for each type of vehicle which attends incidents on numbered highways. The number varies, but is between $300 and $800 per hour for each truck. You do the math... 1 tanker/pumper, 1 rescue, 1 traffic control truck from 4:45 to 7:30. That's about 3 hours X 3 trucks X $500 per hour. A tidy bill of $4500 goes to Alberta infrastructure.

And herein lies the reason that every volunteer fire department in Alberta wants to provide rescue services on the hiways.

We do about 40 MVA's each year on the hiways. 40 X ~$2000 average, and that's $60,000 per year in our virtual pockets.....

Again. That's why every fire department wants to do this work... Do you see where I'm going with this????? You know who really would like a piece of this action.

If you know who gets it, we all shake hands and turn over the keys to the fire trucks....

There. I've outed the issue... No one of influence will ever see this, so I'm not going to lose sleep over it.


Back to where I started. The stupidity of people is still amazing me after all these years. This is the 4th driver who was going the wrong way on a divided hiway in as many years. I don't knwo what you have to do to get that disoriented that you end up in that situation. It would make for an interesting interview. Don't you think?


RSA